Every June, India waits for the same sound. The first heavy drops on a tin roof. The monsoon, arriving the way it has for thousands of years.
A new forecast carries an unsettling line. The El Nino now taking shape in the Pacific Ocean could become the strongest ever recorded.
It already has a nickname borrowed from the movies, Godzilla El Nino.
The southwest monsoon, at least, has arrived. It reached the Kerala coast on June 4, three days late, and is now creeping north.
El Nino is harder to pin down. The stretch of water that scientists watch most closely has already warmed past the line that defines El Nino conditions.
European forecasters expect it to keep building, but no agency, including the United States climate body, has yet declared a sustained event official. It is expected to firm up by September.
WHAT IS EL NINO?
El Nino is one half of a giant climate see-saw called the El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.
Picture the tropical Pacific as a swing. One side is the warm phase, El Nino. The other is the cool phase, La Nina.
Normally, steady winds called the trade winds push warm surface water across the Pacific towards Asia.
During El Nino, those winds weaken. The warm water slides back eastward, and the ocean changes the address where it stores its heat.
Scientists track it in a patch of the central Pacific called the Nino 3.4 region.
Weekly temperatures there have already climbed to about 0.9 degrees Celsius above normal, past the 0.5-degree mark that signals El Nino.
HOW STRONG WILL EL NINO GET?
The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations weather body, still puts the odds of a full, sustained event at 80 per cent for the coming months, because it waits for the warmth to hold before making it official.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts expects the Nino 3.4 region to reach 3 degrees Celsius above normal by December, with some forecasts touching 4.
That would beat the joint record holders of 1997 to 1998 and 2015 to 2016. The last El Nino helped make 2024 the hottest year ever measured.
WHY INDIA IS WATCHING THE SKY
For India, El Nino usually means the same thing. A weaker monsoon.
The reason lies in the air above the ocean. When the Pacific warms, the band of rising air and heavy rain that feeds the region drifts eastward, away from India, and the monsoon winds lose some of their push.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast below-normal rainfall this season, around 90 per cent of the Long Period Average, the benchmark drawn from 50 years of rainfall data between 1971 and 2020. It puts the chance of a deficient season at 60 per cent.
The Indian Ocean Dipole, a separate ocean pattern that can sometimes rescue a faltering monsoon, is expected to stay neutral this year.
The monsoon is not just weather. It delivers about 70 per cent of India’s yearly rain, and more than half the country’s farmland has no irrigation.
During the last big El Nino, in 2015 to 2016, India received just 86 per cent of its average rain and slid into drought. With roughly 60 per cent of farmers depending on these rains for their summer crops, a weak monsoon is felt in the soil first, and in the price of food soon after.
For a country where the rains still decide what a meal costs, a poor monsoon is never just a number on a chart. It is the difference between a good year and a hard one.
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